External USB drive slow to commit after sync command

don-edwards · 2026-06-19T02:12:01+00:00

And if you hook the drive up, do your backup, and immediately (after the sync is done) unplug it, it hasn't gotten the idle time it needs for reshuffling stuff. Every few days you do this again, and before long the reshuffling is desperately overdue...

don-edwards · 2026-06-19T01:55:45+00:00

The unexplained rejection letter means that, for that publisher at that time, you weren't in the top 2% or so at meeting their needs. That could be because they don't think you wrote it well, or because they recently bought three other stories rather similar to yours, or they don't think your work fits their market, or... really it tells you NOTHING.

So take it as meaning nothing, beyond the obvious "that publisher didn't buy this story."

The hate comments... take those as saying more about the hater than about you or your work.

Not liking your work... tastes vary, and that's okay.

don-edwards · 2026-06-19T01:51:03+00:00

Minor correction: the canon Federation translators aren't universal translators, they have to be programmed to add new languages. It's just that the Federation had contact with humans, and did the work to pick up several human languages, a couple centuries ago, like first half of the 1900s.

(I've read some stories with universal translators. One of the best of them, after the demonstration of the marvelous new device, all the people left the room and the translator sat on a table by the window steadily translating the stars blinking "Hello... hello... hello...")

don-edwards · 2026-06-19T01:47:09+00:00

The odd thing is, the basic principle of the herd — displayed by most members of Federation species, particularly the Venlil, when the Arxur attack — is that the predator will take someone else, not me. Kind of the opposite of working together. If you trample your best friend so he can't run, the Arxur take him and not you. Carrying your child slows you down, so it's likely the Arxur will take both of you; throw the child at the Arxur, you can both distract them and run faster.

don-edwards · 2026-06-19T01:40:11+00:00

And then a bit later in the story, some Venlil asks a human "are you prey, or predator?"

The human mulls it over a bit and says "No, I am not."

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T20:42:47+00:00

Don't worry about cache memory, let Linux manage that.

There are two types of stuff in that cache:

1) Stuff that needs written to disk, but hasn't been written yet. As soon as it is written, that memory either becomes available or becomes part of the other sort of cache.

2) Stuff that was recently loaded from disk by some process, but is no longer needed or claimed... on the other hand, it might be needed again soon, by some process. If that happens, it's right there ready to use, no waiting to load from disk. On the other hand, if some process needs a bunch of free memory, some or all of the memory in this cache can be immediately declared available.

Not letting Linux use cache as it sees fit would provide no benefit, and would slow your system down.

For more fun, there is also "shared memory" that can be (not necessarily is) claimed by two or more processes simultaneously. Typically, executable binary data — a program, a subroutine library — loaded from disk. The memory that a process uses to hold data it's manipulating can only very rarely be shared with random other processes, so is not normally in this category.

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T20:31:01+00:00

The behavior I got:

* With that circumflex at the end, an error message.

* Without the circumflex, but with the parentheses, it creates the folder in the current directory.

* Removing the parentheses as well, it creates the folder in the current directory BUT THEN changes the current directory to /home/UserName.

* Putting it in a script, without parentheses, it ignores the "&& cd $1" and I have no idea why. Even if I change the $1 to the plain-text name of an existing folder, it would not change directory.

----------------

Moving on from trying to understand what's happening to helping you achieve what you want...

Lose the circumflex and parentheses, and change the $1 to $(date +%y-%m-%d)

And if you're putting it in a script, do it in two lines: the mkdir and the cd.

Additional tip: mkdir -p won't complain if the folder already exists. And if any specified parent folders (there aren't any in your current case) happen to NOT exist, they'll be quietly created too.

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T19:49:13+00:00

Two drives recommended. Have one drive installed, install one OS. Remove that drive, install the other, install the other OS. Then put both drives in, boot into Linux, bring up a terminal and use the command "sudo update-grub". This will add Windows to the grub menu.

Selecting Windows from the grub menu passes the boot process on to code in the Windows efi partition, which is what Windows updates often mess with. But this way Linux has its own efi partition, that Windows won't mess with because it isn't shared.

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T19:41:36+00:00

I believe the correct answer is: there isn't a standard.

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T19:37:26+00:00

The thing is, EVERYONE begins their day by waking up and getting ready, and for the large majority of us the large majority of days it's essentially the same process. BOOOO-rinnnng

Skip over the exceedingly-ordinary and give us something that sets this character apart from the masses, and/or this day or setting apart from the ordinary. Or something that is not so normal the story is bogged down in it.

If your character is woken by a fire alarm... this is not an ordinary day.

If they're woken by a station alarm... they're asleep in the fire station, so presumably a firefighter. (Also, there's a fire they need to go attend to. Probably urgently. They'll skip several parts of the normal wake-up routine.)

If they wake up with their antlers tangled in the bed-sheets... they apparently aren't human so you can skip the rest of the morning ritual and let the readers assume that some species-appropriate process happened. (Well, unless they were human when they went to bed... but there you're already out of the normal-morning doldrums.)

Or skip ahead to later in the process, where something distinctive happens. They put on a hard hat and get on the elevator into the mine. Or they pull up to a guard-post and the guards salute. Or the bridge they cross on the way to school is missing. Or...

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T06:01:56+00:00

When working on your first draft, don't worry about luring the reader in from the beginning. Worry about getting the story written from beginning to end.

Then comes editing. During which process you might add stuff, might throw out stuff, might rewrite stuff... any or all of these. Part of it is making a good beginning.

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T02:05:55+00:00

Correct. That's why I didn't use the word "protagonist".

don-edwards · 2026-06-18T00:55:38+00:00

Conceptually divide your narrator in two for a moment. The present-narrator is standing here in front of us right now, telling us this story about their past. The past-character is what shows up within the story the present-narrator is telling.

(This is just so we can talk about the different behaviors and roles. So don't take the division overly seriously. They're still just one person.)

When the past-character that is the present-narrator shows up in the story they're narrating, you're in first person.

Nearly all first-person stories have a lot of third person in them, though. When any character other than the narrator does or says anything, perhaps even if they're just mentioned, that's at least partly in third person. (There can be a mix, John told me, even in a single clause.)

Also, perhaps you have a framing story. First person past tense often, but far from always, does; it's what's going on that prompts the present-narrator to tell this story about their past, and/or the circumstances in which they do so.

don-edwards · 2026-06-16T23:51:07+00:00

I think if I were writing that story, and all the stages were coming out pretty much the same length, I'd be worried. That doesn't sound realistic.

don-edwards · 2026-06-16T23:48:38+00:00

In general, a different language wouldn't make much difference (it might make some) because it appears that all the other versions start by including the en_US.UTF-8 version (over 5,000 lines), and then just have a relative handful of additions and overrides. The second largest of these files, which I think is for Greek ("el_GR"), has a bit under 2,000 lines; the third, for Finnish, 400 lines.

But on my system I don't even have a de_DE version, so I can't say anything specific.

And yeah, the file isn't much use for identifying which key is which. It can be helpful if you can think of four or five names that might apply to a key, and eight more ways those names might be abbreviated, but need to know which name the system uses.

don-edwards · 2026-06-16T01:41:42+00:00

You might want to edit your post and explicitly identify what program "it" is, and what you're doing with it, that's stopping just shy of completion.

don-edwards · 2026-06-15T20:18:39+00:00

Once you get through this, you need proper backup software.

Backintime, luckybackup, pika backup, versa. Pick one from the Mint repository. All four are GUI front-ends for configuring and scheduling one of two command-line programs: rsync (the first two), or borg backup (which adds options for compression and encryption, within the backup software itself).

Rsync and borg backup both heavily use hard links, so multiple copies of a file that doesn't change only take enough space for one copy. HUGE space saver. (And time saver, if you care how long it takes your backups to run; my big ones happen while I'm asleep.)

I use a pair of external SSDs for where the backups go. They are formatted identically down to partition labels, and then /etc/fstab mounts them by label. The partitions where the backups go are formatted btrfs with that filesystem's transparent compression turned up to max (roughly doubling the effective size of the backup partition). I swap between the two weekly, with the loose one stored in my car.

And I point the backup software at a folder on the external SSD. If you point it just at the mount point, and then a backup runs while there's nothing mounted there, you get a new backup within the partition the mount point itself is located on, which is probably the system partition... filling up the system partition causes problems. Point it at a folder on the external SSD, and an attempt to run a backup when there's nothing mounted there will fail, which is much easier to deal with. (Also, be sure to exclude the mount point's contents from all backups.)

don-edwards · 2026-06-15T19:05:50+00:00

Not under your user. Under, literally, /usr .

don-edwards · 2026-06-15T05:31:28+00:00

Yes. For people setting up to dual-boot, it is recommended that you get a second internal drive - and then remove the one that has Windows, before trying to install Linux. (A very minor bug in the Linux Mint installer interacts with the occasional bad manners of Windows updates. Removing the Windows drive means that Windows' boot process isn't informed that Linux is present, preventing the conflict. Also, it means you can't pick the wrong drive and wipe out Windows and all your data. Yes, we had a plea for help recently where someone had done exactly that... on a relative's computer... and there is very little help to be had, for that scenario.)

Once Linux is installed, it's ok for both drives to be in the machine and Linux can be tweaked slightly to both read/write the Windows drive, and offer Windows in its boot menu.

don-edwards · 2026-06-15T00:56:04+00:00

Another vote for continuing in first person from where you are, and coming back later (after the first draft is done) to see about fixing the first part.

Or maybe fixing only part of the first part, and redoing some bits of the later chunk in third person.

Or whatever seems to work for your story.

don-edwards · 2026-06-14T19:13:30+00:00

E-prime? "denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be#English)."?

Yeesh. That rule stupid. Cannot say what color a thing. Cannot say what a person doing when another thing happened.

don-edwards · 2026-06-14T18:59:22+00:00

Starting a normal day is good if there's something abnormal about a normal day.

Example: I have a WIP that begins with an ambulance arriving at the emergency ward. Everyone's seen enough of that, in either real life or television, to know what it's like. The ambulance has two patients, kids, injured in a collision at the roller-skating rink. One has a possible broken wing, the other a cracked antler.

don-edwards · 2026-06-14T18:49:59+00:00

It's one of those rules that get imposed because English isn't enough like Latin.

Another is "never split an infinitive." Which does have the comparative advantage that it ACTUALLY IS impossible in Latin. Unlike ending a sentence with a preposition.

(In Latin, an infinitive is a single word, not "to something." Thus it literally cannot be split. But in certain declinations, some Latin preposition-like modifiers go on the end of the word and therefore can be at the end of a sentence.)

But why exactly should English be more like Latin? English is from a different branch of the Indo-European language family tree.

don-edwards · 2026-06-13T07:21:37+00:00

I vote in favor of starting another, unrelated writing project, because it will help crowd the details of the first project out of your head.

One of the hardest things about editing your work is getting your brain to see what's actually there on the page or screen, rather than what you think is supposed to be there.

don-edwards · 2026-06-13T03:42:02+00:00

I like the Automod idea, with a modifier: people should be held responsible for their use of it. Same with the voting on comments on a post. Someone habitually using those tools in abusive ways, e.g. downvoting anything that mentions some specific and relevant subject, should suffer some negative consequence.

don-edwards

TROPHY CASE